I agree this sort of suggestion is almost always made by or about English speakers. The people making would never think to impose it in any other language or only pretend they’re also proposing that after the double standard is pointed out. But still virtually nobody in countries where the native language isn’t English ever suggests this. The more interesting discussion might be why this idea is sometimes proposed for English but virtually never for any other language.
It’s true that certain foreign place names which never had a name peculiar to different languages have changed everywhere due to preference of the country in which they are located. But many place name changes in Far East are purely transliteration changes. For example the name of the No.2 city in the ROK has not really changed. It’s the same underlying Chinese characters and same sounds for them in the Korean alphabet as always, just one Korean letter formerly transliterated ‘P’ is now transliterated as ‘B’ so Busan not Pusan. Similarly with the vast majority of the many Chinese place names which use different Latin letters now. In only a few cases did the Communists change the actual (Chinese character) names of those places. For example the name of the capital hasn’t changed and English speakers didn’t use a ‘different’ one from what Chinese did, the same two characters are just transliterated Beijing rather than Peking, arguably increasing accuracy in that case. But in general no simple transliteration system for Chinese (or Korean) words is always more accurate in English. And of course Chinese themselves pronounce (as opposed to writing) the same word fairly differently in dialects.
Most of these countries don’t WANT you to pronounce it their way. A few extractions exist - Côte d’Ivoire and Timor-Leste. Czechia is an alternative name that some people use but didn’t catch on
It’s still pretty early on Czechia (wasn’t it only made official like a year or two ago?). I wouldn’t be surprised if it does catch on. (And it’s not an endonym, anyway.)
True, and that choice has its own issues of supposed chauvinism depending which option. ‘America’ is a no-no to some people to refer to the US, and even ‘United States’ could be viewed as presumptuous (given that the official name of Mexico for example could also be shortened to ‘United [Mexican] States’, etc). The ‘pronounce it their way’ movement seems to be motivated by fighting some kind of chauvinism supposedly demonstrated by having uniquely English words for foreign places. But unfortunately some abbreviated versions of the name of the country often called ‘US’ have their own issues to the hypersensitive in this regard.
This link says Nihon wins by 2/3’s v 1/3 in a recent (as of 2014) survey. As the link lists, a number of well known Japanese companies/organizations render their names Nippon X, others Nihon X. It’s also surprising to me as many as 1/3 of ordinary people would say Nippon is correct. As the link says, that version has precedence but I wonder if all those answering that it’s more correct actually say it that way. But again with Sinic words one might tale the position that the Chinese characters are the word, therefore that word is is 日本, and that it’s still the same word whether you pronounce it Nihon or Nippon, or Ilbon (as Koreans almost always do*), etc.
*there has been some movement in S. Korean usage toward pronouncing Sinic proper nouns applying to other countries the way the Chinese, Japanese, etc. do rather than using the Korean pronunciations of the Chinese characters of those proper nouns, people’s name or place names. So for example nowadays S Korean media doesn’t write the capital of China as 북경 in the Korean alphabet, which is the Korean pronunciation of the characters 北京, ‘Bukgyeong’, but rather as 베이징 to mimic the Mandarin pronunciation of those characters, ‘Be-i-jing’. Ordinary people though (especially older) might say Bukgyeong. Anyway this hasn’t extended to the name of Japan, which is still almost always written Ilbon (=일본=日本) in the Korean alphabet. I would personally say Ilbon and Nihon/Nippon are ‘the same word’, similarly for loads of common nouns that are the same Chinese characters pronounced differently in Korean, Japanese and/or Chinese.
Funny, I have the polar opposite attitude. When I studied in Budapest, many native English speakers pronounced the city “Budapesht,” since in Hungarian it’s pronounced with the SH sound. I myself found that reasoning silly since we were speaking in English, so we’d might as well use English pronunciations. Now if I were saying a whole sentence in Hungarian, THEN it would have made sense to me to pronounce the city as “Budapesht.”
Actually, upon further reflection, I see your point. I remember when I lived in Budapest I would orient myself according to subway stops, trolley stops, etc. So it confused me when someone would mention “Deak Square” or “Margaret Bridge” since the pre-recorded voice would call the places “Deak Ter” and “Margit Hid.”
Though upon even FURTHER reflection, can you imagine how hard it would be to learn the words for things like square and bridge in dozens of languages?
Just last night, there was a clue on Jeopardy! for which the contestant said “What is Byelorussia?” They counted him wrong, because they wanted “Belarus.” I felt for the guy. He looked to be about my age, and back in grade school, when I was learning European geography, “Byelorussia” was what they taught us!
Well, it’s not an exonym in the sense that a foreign entity didn’t name them, but the Czech government requested it. It’s not really an endonym either, as in it’s not a variant of “Česko” or “Česká republika.”
I think we should stop trying to transition. I’m tired of people getting all pretentious and using the name from another language. The name of a country is no different from any other word, use the name in our language. How many countries pronounce United States, of, and/or America the way we do?
Don’t most country names basically come down to just “us guys” in their native language? I’m pretty sure I read that in a Dope column many years ago. So it would basically be *wrong *for foreigners to call them by that.
That doesn’t sound right to me. Maybe if you go far enough back etymologically, there’s something like that, but all the countries I could think of it generally comes down to “Land of the XXX” where XXX is the name of a peoples/tribe/etc.
Ukraine changed the official transliteration of Kiev to Kyiv in 1995 (not that it’s really caught on), and that always struck me as kind of odd. It would as if the US passed a law saying our official name in Spanish is ‘El Estados Unidos’ instead of ‘Los Estados Unidos’ (which would be consistent with the English usage: ‘The United States is…’)
